No person, in my opinion, has done more to change the direction of the discussion on transgenderism than J.K Rowling.
She has made headlines again this week for donating to female-only breastfeeding support groups in what’s seen as a protest against the NHS’s continued nonsense in describing mothers as “chestfeeders” and “people who have ovaries”.
Posting about her support for the MoMa breastfeeding support charity she said: “Mother-to-mother support is incredibly important at what many women can find a challenging time” and added that donors “get a free gift, too. The gift of annoying men who can’t abide biological women having anything that excludes them.”
The tweet summed up the hugely popular author’s determination not to give way on an issue which has now become the focus of significant controversy – but which, before the leadership of Rowling and the courage of some few women and men – was subject that brooked no discussion or debate.
Transgenderism, it should be remembered, sought to impose a new theory of biology on society, and it seemed unstoppable. Many people felt it was wrong and ludicrous; but most felt unable to resist the outrage, the social media mobs, the threat of police investigations and of being utterly cancelled to the point of losing jobs and careers. That, thankfully, is changing.
That is not to say that those suffering from genuine gender dysphoria are always, or arguably often, represented by the extremists who shout loudest and drive the most hostile campaigns – extremists who, in some cases, appear to be more motivated by narcissism than anything else.
In an interview with Michael Shellenberger, Professor of psychology Sam Vakninn, who has studied narcissism, says that a narcissist has no “Sense of Self”. In narcissistic personality disorder, Vaknin explains, the individual failing to develop a “Self” creates a substitute or a “False Self.” Inside the narcissist there is an absence masquerading as a presence; what Vaknin described as “the empty schitzoid core; a howling void”
The “Sense of Self” and “Identity” are two clinical terms in psychology which describe the narrative that a person tells about themselves, and the sense of continuity felt by the individual
Vaknin says the narcissist has a false sense of self which is fed from the outside. “The major function of the False Self is to create an interface that would trigger people to provide responses known as narcissistic supply. This is affirmation from the public of the narcissist’s uniqueness. Even if that uniqueness is as “the biggest victim” or, “the biggest loser”.
This matters as it is individuals who drive history. Even when it comes to collectivist visions which depend upon bureaucracies for implementation, it is individuals of powerful enigmatic personality that force the events and direction of the bureaucracy. The gargantuan totalitarian movements of the last century are testament to this. Would Lenin and Stalin’s gulags and the archipelago of state monitoring and suppression have been possible without the ferocious energy of these two individuals?
The post WWII consensus of western European philosophy was to build bureaucracies in order to prevent the rise of “Great Men” and totalitarian movements. There would be no conquering militarist such as Hitler, Alexander, or Napolean. This heralded the rise of the “democratic institutions” which have grown in the new philosophical petri-dish of the post war era. Surprisingly, nobody stopped to question whether a permanent bureaucracy could become totalitarian.
The “democratic institutions” of our days are not voted into place, and cannot be voted out, and increasingly overrule parliamentary power through incremental measures designed to denude the power of national parliaments. It’s curious that “our democracy” can act in a similar way to the feudal rule of a managerial elite.
Mostly, ideology has no corrective mechanism; no reality testing; and the institutions of democracy run by a permanent managerial elite, have increasingly become parasitized by ideology. Their driving function increasingly isn’t to represent the needs and will of an electorate. Lacking that motivational vision they are instead driven by ideology.
Ideology transformed into bureaucratic function gives an organisation both its procedural purpose – its unifying narrative – and its inertia. It is in this context that many of the crazy ideas of the modern left have filtered down from a predominantly left wing intellectual elite and become ingrained in civic institutionalism.
The trans ideology is sometimes so at odds with reality that its growth seemed to attract a number of narcissists who achieve narcissistic supply through competitive victimhood.
Scrolling Rowling’s X profile highlights an unending reel of interactions with unhinged people who inhabit a cultish “Shared Fantasy”. Shared Fantasy is another clinical term defined by Vaknin as when the narcissist establishes a narrative that is rarefied in a physical space and then that shared space provides a firewall against countervailing data and reality. New information is only allowed into this shared fantasy if it fits “the narrative.” It is by nature totalitarian.
Rowling has a gift at categorising the behaviour of such people. This is not a diagnostic definition, but as a persuasion device, “narcissistic rage” seems to describe many of those who rail against her fairly well.
But the “narcissistic rage” that has shocked an initially sympathetic public is only possible because the ideology of transgenderism had been embraced by the institutions of state; especially the institutions of law and policing.
If it is verboten to even question transgenderism because of some form of protected victim status, well then the excess will only increase. This is how “Shared Fantasies” work. It’s the firewall of protected status that allows for the pathology of the movement to grow; and for its resistance to countervailing reality.
But Rowling didn’t back away from the fight. She has used her own resources wisely to counter the career-activist-cultivated public narrative. In Edinburgh, for instance, she personally funded a women’s only shelter for abused women, after the Edinburgh rape crisis centre appointed a ‘trans woman’ as chief executive.
Not Rowling however.
Her rival centre for abused women focused attention on the ludicrous appointment of a man into a position of power in the only place vulnerable and abused women could turn to. The fact that the women had no other place to go, only sharpened the flaw in this appointment. The untenable position of the Edinburgh Rape Crisis Centre became unsustainable once there was an opposing option whose very existence was a sharp criticism of the dire loss of direction of the Edinburgh RCC.
Rowling has the tactical intelligence and resources to know which battles are winnable and will get the public on the side of sanity. She does this with an immense degree of bravery, intelligence and vision.
This took courage. One person, albeit a very wealthy one, aligned against the massed resources and intransigence of occupied institutions. All of the coercive and intellectual civic institutions seemed arrayed against her; law, politics, media, academia, entertainment, even publishing. The ungrateful actors whom her talent had given a platform to and made famous attacked her repeatedly.
It takes an unusually determined and morally unbending character to take on a fight like this and maintain a consistency of argument. It takes both uncompromising personality and high order intelligence. This combination is very rare.
Rowling seems to know when to use reason – and also when to call out abusive narcissism.